One of the things I've spent my time working on recently has been the rather nasty topic of severing limbs, and also how to mitigate around that when you're unfortunate enough to have a limb severed yourself. I thought that it would probably be worthwhile to give you all a bit of information on how it works and how it will impact your average combatant character.

First of all, there are now five ways a limb can be rendered ineffective:

* It can have a "non-trivial" part severed; for example, having a finger severed does not prevent you from using the associated arm, but if you had your hand severed at the wrist it is effectively useless.

* The bodyparts making up the limb can take more damage in sum than a threshold amount (currently set to 20% of total HP).

* The bodyparts making up the limb can take more pain in sum than a threshold amount (currently set to 20% of total pain).

* An individual "non-trivial" bodypart can take an excessive amount of damage.

* An individual "non-trivial" bodypart can take an excessive amount of pain.

If any of these conditions are met, the limb is "not usable". This means that, in the case of an arm, you cannot use that arm to wield, get, hold or manipulate items. In the case of a leg, you cannot use that leg to stand.

It's worth noting that the "severing" point for most bodyparts is approximately double the threshold of "excessive damage", and only slashing/chopping/shearing damage types can cause severing. However, to compensate, other damage types like crushing will have a large chance of being "permanent", particularly if they are not treated medically.

So, if you beat a limb into a pulp, while it'll still be there, it may never properly heal - and you might need to seek out a surgeon to amputate it for you (yes, surgical amputation is a thing now!).

It's not all doom and gloom once it is severed though because you can get yourself a fancypants prosthetic to replace what was lost! Prosthetics are individually designed for a particular degree of severing - a prosthetic designed to replace a right arm severed at the shoulder cannot be used for a left arm, or for a right arm severed at the elbow.

Additionally, prosthetics can be both obvious and discreet, and functional or non functional.

Obvious prosthetics are obvious to anybody who sees them: there's no denying a hook hand or a peg leg or a cybernetic arm is not your natural limb. As long as people can see them (i.e. they're not completely covered by clothes), people will be able to see your prosthetic if it's obvious. At the moment, the only way to detect a non-obvious prosthetic is medical examination. Non-obvious prosthetics are really aimed at futuristic, realistic limbs.

Functional prosthetics can be used for whatever the real bodypart would've been used for - a functional prosthetic eye gives vision, and a functional prosthetic hand works as a hand for grasping things. A non-functional prosthetic would be purely for show.

Anybody can install a prosthetic at the moment but in the future I may make skill-based restrictions (a functional cybereye might require a surgeon to install for example). Similarly, anybody can remove a prosthetic. Other people can't remove your prosthetics without consent (you have to ACCEPT it) unless you can't resist (you're unconscious or asleep). So, one could very well knock someone out and steal their prosthetic limbs so they couldn't run away.

Prosthetic limbs can still be hit in combat just like any other limb - damage to them however does not contribute to overall hp, pain or stun loss to the individual. However, if the prosthetic limb takes enough damage, it will be destroyed, and no longer function.

Future expansion may see prosthetics give penalties or bonuses to checks or stats, but v1.0 does not impose any such penalties.

As a final note, I also intend to make a surgical option to reattach a severed limb in the case where the technology level of the mud is sufficiently high (LabMUD counts for this) and the limb has not decayed too much. This will be forthcoming in the near future!

I would hope that these are rare, though. One concern that's been voiced in the past in separate arenas is that people don't like to play maimed characters. If legs are flying off every encounter at every sword swing, no one's going to want to do any conflict.

I mean, think about some of the Atonement characters, a lot of the combat groups would have been walking pieces of plastic.

That being said - a skilled surgeon character operating on a busted eyeball or a biotech person crafting actuating legs seems neat.